Annulment

Thailand's Constitutional Court today annulled last month's parliamentary election and ordered a new vote, a court official said. Outgoing Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra dissolved Parliament in February and called the election amid huge protests against his government. His Thais Love Thais party won 57% of the vote, but millions of Thais cast protest votes and an opposition boycott left the lower house without the full 500 lawmakers required for Parliament to convene.

This nation was thrown into political disarray Tuesday as the Constitutional Court ripped the carpet from under the feet of its wobbly coalition government, formed two months ago to keep the country's increasingly influential Islamists out of power. The court annulled the parliament's vote of confidence in the coalition because it was not an absolute majority vote, as parliamentary regulations dictate. The ruling was an extraordinary indictment of the gridlocked mess that Turkish politics is in.

A mayor who proposed that $77,000 in traffic tickets be annulled as a symbol of compassion during the Christmas season has been removed from office. The Board of Aldermen in Nixa, a southwestern Missouri town of 2,600 people, dismissed Mayor Luther Meadows on Monday on four charges of violating his oath of office. The mayor plans to sue, his lawyer said.

Amid a groundswell of international support for the breakaway Baltics, Lithuania's president called Sunday for the Soviet Parliament to annul the last documents relating to the three republics' annexation. Vytautas Landsbergis told reporters that he would travel to Moscow today if he could arrange meetings with officials, including Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Dozens of gay and lesbian couples arrived in this rural town Friday to get married after a county clerk announced she would grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but the offer was soon revoked. The Sandoval County clerk's office granted licenses to 26 same-sex couples before New Mexico Atty. Gen. Patricia Madrid issued a late afternoon opinion that the licenses were "invalid under state law."

The government annulled a marriage between a 9-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, arranged because his mother needed a servant and the bride's father needed cattle. The parents were ordered jailed last week by Kuria District Commissioner John Egesa, the Kenya News Agency reported. There were no details on the terms of their incarceration. The Ministry of Education is campaigning against early marriages to quell the high dropout rate in Kuria district schools.

A judge annulled the marriage of a woman with Alzheimer's disease after concluding that her husband, accused of spending nearly $300,000 of her fortune in Las Vegas, was only after her money. Denver District Judge John Coughlin ruled that 79-year-old Glenna Birmingham was not mentally competent when she wed 41-year-old Wando Stevens in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. He rejected claims by Stevens, who has a felony theft record, that the two were in love.

A New York judge struck down the state's ban on gay marriage as unconstitutional Friday, paving the way for five same-sex couples to wed and opening the door to a contentious battle over the issue in the Empire State. State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan, however, stayed her ruling for 30 days -- expecting that there would be appeals. The Supreme Court is New York's trial-level court.

Pope John Paul II warned today against granting marriage annulments too readily on psychiatric grounds. He told members of the Sacred Roman Rota, the appeal body which judges difficult annulment cases, that "psychological incapacity has become the reason given for a large number of annulment rulings, especially in certain countries." He said the dedication of psychologists and psychiatrists was praiseworthy and useful but should not be allowed to obscure the issues for church annulment judges.

MEXICO CITY - The Guatemalan high court's decision to annul the genocide conviction of former military dictator Efrain Rios Montt on Tuesday revived questions about his responsibility for the slaughter of some 1,700 ethnic Maya people. The ruling late Monday, which voided Rios Montt's May 10 conviction, also raises questions about the kind of retrial he might have and about a judicial system that has long been considered weak, corrupt, prone to impunity and susceptible to pressure from powerful outside forces.